QUICK MEALS TO YOUR TABLE FIVE DAYS A WEEK.

Happy Friday, everybody. It's raining and blustery in Chicago, it's almost the weekend, and we're launching a new Twitter account. It's shiny and slick and, at the moment, a little bit lonely. So come follow us!

Sure, you may already follow Nick or me on Twitter individually, but in case you were really confused about who to follow--as time and again, even our most faithful readers admit they're not really sure who is who on this site (nor do they care all that much), now you know. No longer do you have to hear us talk about whose dog is eating what, or bands you've never heard of. It's just the food here on out.

The Paupered Chef Twitter account will also update you with every new post on the blog, as well as offer a steady stream of...

In today's Dinner Tonight column (the post will be up later this afternoon) I walk through a very simple garlic soup recipe from Mario Batali's Spain: A Culinary Road Trip. It's the kind of a soup I adore, being nothing more than a few cloves of garlic, good chicken stock, and a few pieces of stale bread. The one wild card is hot pimentón, which is a Spanish smoked paprika.

I didn't have any on the shelf, and in my haste, I almost just substituted some regular old paprika to get things moving. But something stopped me this time, and made me seek...

In one of the opening scenes of My Life in France, Julia Child experiences an early meal in France with her husband, Paul, a lunch at La Couronne, a medieval house turned restaurant built in 1345. After oysters, she goes on to describe an early culinary epiphany, apart of what would become "the most exciting meal of my life."

Paul had decided to order sole meunière. It arrive whole: a large, flat Dover sole that was perfectly browned in a sputtering butter sauce with a sprinkling of chopped parsley on top...I closed my eyes and inhaled the rising perfume. Then I lifted a forkful of fish to my mouth, took a bite, and...

Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.

"Dinner Tonight" Column

QUICK MEALS TO YOUR TABLE FIVE DAYS A WEEK.

Fish Fragrant Eggplant
Your house won't start reeking of seafood when this dish is done. But honestly, there's a faint fishy flavor in the air. It's kind of miraculous. How could a dish were no fish products get close, smell of it?

stlbites.com/flickr

Welcome to Wednesday Links. This is our weekly collection of four of the most interesting food links we've discovered in the past week. Enjoy!

Reinventing Salt
[via Kottke.org]
In order to meet goals for lowering salt in processed foods, Frito-Lay has spent who knows how much money engineering crystals that "dissolve more quickly, effectively putting the sodium on your tongue, not in your digestive system."

British Bacon vs American bacon

If you've been reading the site lately, you may have been following Nick on his rather strange quest to recreate a full English breakfast from scratch (his first project was the British banger sausage). Why, I don't know. But when Nick proposed that I take over the homemade bacon portion of the project, I leapt at the opportunity to contribute. Homemade meat curing has long been a hobby of mine, despite the protests of my wife when I hung a pork jowl in our living room. For me, the bacon is the most...

Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.

"Dinner Tonight" Column

QUICK MEALS TO YOUR TABLE FIVE DAYS A WEEK.

Pistachio Asparagus Pesto on Linguine
This pesto may look similar, but it swaps the pine nuts for pistachios, and stays green thanks to a handful of spinach. It's not as herbaceous as the traditional version, but it's creamier and more delicate.

I'm pretty sure the word "gnudi" wasn't on anyone's radar until they were served at The Spotted Pig in New York, which was when they became a food dork household name. In Italian, "gnudi" means what it sounds like in English: naked. It refers to little pasta-like dumplings that are "naked" of their pasta wrapper, raviolis without anything to enclose them. Gnudi are a bit like gnocchi, but they have far less flour and so are pillowy in the way that gnocchi never are.

The Spotted Pig has gotten more press than it will ever need, and I don't feel the need to sing its praises too lengthily here. It's an outstanding New York restaurant serving food...

A few weeks ago, a mad group of seven men took part in the great Chicago Italian Sub Tour of 2010. We visited six places, ate way more than we should have, and came away with the pretty definite conclusion that J.P. Graziano served the best Italian sub of the day. They used the best bread, and paid the most attention to each individual element of the sandwich. Oddly though, mixed in with all the Italian subs was one oddball sandwich that we felt we needed to sample while on the tour. It was a fiery sub that we had at Riviera Italian and American Food, and it cast shadow over...

Welcome to Wednesday Links. This is our weekly collection of four of the most interesting food links we've discovered in the past week. Enjoy!

National Association of Science Writers: Is Salt Actually Bad For You?
"While the government has been denouncing salt as a health hazard for decades, no amount of scientific effort has been able to dispense with the suspicions that it is not....At its core, the salt controversy is a philosophical clash between the requirements of public health policy and the...

Making cocktails is a tricky business. The balance--between sour and sweet, harsh and smooth--can easily be lost if one isn't careful; most recipes are so expertly calibrated that making any kind of substitution is a bad idea. A cocktail is often a significant investment that goes down the drain if you screw it up (or in my case, gulped down with a wince because I am incapable of admitting defeat). Some rarer cocktail ingredients are expensive, and so making a bad cocktail is especially disappointing when you are literally pouring money down the drain.

We realize it's been a tad quiet over here for the past couple weeks, but there is some exciting news. As of, well...yesterday, I'm the new editor of Grub Street Chicago. I'll cover all the juicy restaurant news in our city from fine dining to as many posts about hot dogs I can manage. Check out my intro post here. It's a challenging new position, but one that will allow me to work from home. Yes, I'm still in pajamas.

And don't worry, we have some truly exciting things planned for the Paupered Chef coming up very, very soon. With Blake sharpening his skills in culinary school, we hope only to get even more ridiculous in our food adventures.